I went from having over 8,000 shared files in LimeWire, to having 90. It seems that as my hard drive of 150 Gigs was bumping up against storage capacity, I was getting these incessant MS Windows reminders and offers to "delete old or unecessary files." Well, I did so, and next thing I know, the "Disk Cleaner" application is autonomously cleaning out ALL THREE of my HARD DRIVES with no further interaction or querying of me, the Operator/Owner/Licensee. I have forgone "compressing" my hard drives to "save space" because I think that might privatize otherwise shared files. Also, I try to avoid MS DRM Software and Apps such as MediaPlayer and Silverlight for the same reasons. That is, I believe I am the owner and user of my own desktop computer and files. Of course, the corporations, the government, and Microsoft et. al. have other ideas. While I had shared over 8,000 files as recently as a few days ago, I am now showing a completely cleaned out SHARED DIRECTORY (one of several) and my backup app is unable to recover these files, since it ran out of hard drive memory, too. It took me years to collect those files, and just a few minutes to LOSE THEM ALL. Thanks, Microsoft. You can claim another battle victory in a continuing war. Open Source, here I come. Eff MS.

Gawd darm ... Yeah I gave up on such types of utilities years back after I also had ill experiences. Question is how well they removed such files; are the files recoverable. If there is memory issues trying to recover them, try doing the recovery process partition by partition or even folder by folder.

To recover the files, you will need a fresh area to recover the files to, do not recover them to the same (partition) location they went missing from. Try recovering them to an external drive if possible. Recovering the files to the same (partition) location will overwrite other ones where their file skeletons still exist. Instead recover them to any partition where files did not go missing from.

Some other utilities to try to recover your files: http://www.gnutellaforums.com/open-d...ry-advice.html (you will need to sift through the links to find suggestions on alternatives.)

Recuva, from the same nice people who give you CCleaner - PIRIFORM

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File Recovery - Home

And, it's free.